If some part of you has been wondering whether you’re already behind on this whole AI thing, this post is me going and finding out on your behalf.
That feeling isn’t irrational, either. Everyone you follow appears to have built something, there’s a new model every three weeks, and somebody in your world has likely, casually mentioned an agent like it was a toaster, while you’re over here doing the work the way you’ve always done it and wondering at what point not knowing turns into an actual problem.
Over the past year I’ve built multiple Claude Skills for my business and my work week went from four days to two, which happened not because I found some magic tool but because I stopped asking AI for help with my work and started handing it entire jobs instead. Those turned out to be completely different activities with completely different results.
The person who taught me that difference is a woman named Callan Faulkner, and I first heard about her the most Minnesota way possible, which was somebody saying “have you ever heard of her? She’s a fellow Minnesota girl making waves in the AI world.” Minnesota girl? You have my attention.
I attended the AI Employee Bootcamp as a student before I became an affiliate partner for this round. I earn a commission if you buy through my link. This review is based on my own experience.
Is Callan Faulkner’s AI Employee Bootcamp worth it?
For me, yes. I took it as a student before I became an affiliate, and I’m going through it again this fall with my team. The value wasn’t another AI trick or a folder of prompts, it was that the Bootcamp changed what I was asking AI to be, from something I had to steer and correct and re-explain myself to every morning into something with an actual defined job.
If what you want is a pile of clever prompts, don’t buy this, because those are free and I’ll point you toward some further down. But if you’re already using AI most days and you’re tired of being the bottleneck that has to be cleared before anything else can happen, this is where it gets interesting.
Who is Callan Faulkner, and what is The Uncommon Business?
Callan Faulkner is the founder of The Uncommon Business, an AI implementation company that teaches business owners how to build AI employees, meaning AI systems with defined roles, context and standards rather than open chat windows. She built The Uncommon Business to $20.9 million in revenue in under two years, and runs the company today with 40+ human employees and 150+ AI employees. Official information about her company lives at theuncommonbusiness.co.
The reason any of that matters isn’t the revenue, because plenty of people teach AI. Very few of them have bet an actual scaling company on the method and can pull up the org chart to show you, and that distinction is most of why I trusted her enough to spend an afternoon finding out.
What is the AI Employee Bootcamp?
The AI Employee Bootcamp is a live virtual training run by Callan Faulkner, founder of The Uncommon Business. It’s three live 90-minute sessions plus a kickoff call, and by the third session you’ve built two working AI employees rather than notes about building them later. The entire experience is designed to move you past prompting and into assigning AI actual jobs inside your business.
That last part is the reason I said yes. I didn’t need another presentation about everything AI might one day be capable of, since there’s a bottomless supply of those and they all leave me feeling slightly worse than before I watched. What I needed was to see somebody do it, and then do it myself while somebody was still with me in real time to tell me if I’d done it wrong.
What happens in each session?
The Fall 2026 round opens with a kickoff call on Monday, September 28, followed by three live sessions.
Day 1, September 29, 1:00 to 2:30 PM CT. See Inside a Company Run by 150+ AI Employees. Callan screen-shares her actual AI org chart running inside The Uncommon Business and walks through which roles are held by people and which ones aren’t, which is a very different experience from hearing somebody describe what’s theoretically possible.
Day 2, October 1, 1:00 to 2:30 PM CT. See It Working in Businesses Like Yours. She shows the same roles applied across e-commerce, real estate, clinics and service businesses, and then builds one live. This session did the most work for me, because examples are what close the gap between that’s impressive and we could have a version of that live this week.
Day 3, October 6, 1:00 to 2:30 PM CT. Hire Your First Two AI Employees. This is the one you’re paying for, and it’s where you build an SEO and Site Audit AI employee and an ICP Research AI employee.
Worth knowing what those two do, because the names truly undersell them. The SEO and site audit role reviews your website pages, flags what’s thin or broken, and tells you where you’re leaving traffic on the table, which is work most of us keep meaning to get to and never do. The ideal customer research role goes and finds how your ideal audience describes their problem in their own words, which is the raw material for basically every piece of marketing you’ll write afterward.
Both are jobs that are valuable and tedious in equal measure and almost never anybody’s actual assignment, which is exactly why they’re a powerful duo to start with.
The idea underneath it: the AI org chart
Here’s the single takeaway that reorganized my thinking, and it’s worth understanding even if you never buy anything from anybody.
Callan and her team at The Uncommon Business don’t start with what can AI do for me. They start with an org chart, asking what jobs exist inside this business, what does each one need to know to be done well, which ones need a human, and which ones did we hand to a human only because until recently there was nobody else to hand them to. Humans on the front end, AI on the back end, and that’s their entire model, which took her about four minutes to explain and me about six months to fully absorb.
The Bootcamp teaches you to hand jobs off to AI. My Mental Load Dashboard shows you what you’re carrying in the first place, because you can’t hand a job off while it’s still living in your head. It comes free when you register through my link.
Once you’re giving AI a job instead of asking it a question, a different set of questions opens up: what’s its role, what context does it need, what does good work look like here, what standards does it hold, and what should it never do under any circumstances. That’s the shift, and it’s why I keep saying this isn’t some sort of prompting course.
What’s the difference between an AI employee and just using ChatGPT?
Using ChatGPT is asking. Hiring an AI employee is giving AI an actual job. A chat window only knows what you hand it today. You bring the context, you steer the output, and the second you close the tab, the work closes with it. An AI employee doesn’t start over every morning. It holds a defined role, keeps its own context and standards, and shows up already knowing the job.
My old process, if you can generously call it a process, went like this: open ChatGPT, ask something, explain myself, get an answer that’s close but not right, explain again, add the context I should have given it the first time, ask again, eventually get what I need, close the tab, and do it all over again tomorrow.
None of that came from being scared of AI or refusing to use it, because I was using it every day. I’d gotten fast at a manual process and mistaken that for having built something. The tell was that nothing I’d made was running without me.
Here’s the question I’d sit with: how much of my AI use still depends on me being excellent at prompting it every single time?
From “good for her” to “how could AI employees work for my business?”
One of my favorite parts of Callan’s teaching was how many different use cases she put in front of us, from different kinds of businesses running the same underlying idea to examples from inside her own company. And then there was the one that stuck: the ways her own dad was using AI.
That mattered more than I expected it to. Before this, I’d see somebody doing something impressive with AI and think well, good for her. But that would never work for me. I’d scroll on and nothing in my life would change. The Bootcamp turned that into a different question. Okay, so how could I make that idea work for me?
Instead of chasing every new tool, I started looking at my own business. What happens over and over that me or my team is doing manually and do not need to be. What needs our judgment or just needs somebody to have the job.
Why I made my husband drive so I could attend live
I went to every single session, and when I say every session I mean it. We were on a road trip during one of them. So I made my husband drive, because there was zero chance I was missing it, and there I sat in the passenger seat with my laptop open, watching Callan teach and building as she went. He didn’t complain once, though he did glance over a few times.
It was so good, I told Marisa from my team all about it and she bought a ticket to join me inside. Which was even more helpful to make it stick, because we could book-club the whole thing, argue about where the ideas fit, and start assigning ourselves work while it was still fresh. If you have somebody you can bring, bring them, and that’s my one unsolicited tip.
What we built after the AI Employee Bootcamp
Quite a lot, and none of it dramatic, which I think is the honest way to describe it.
We created scheduled tasks. The team found ways to save time on the menial work that had somehow accumulated into everybody’s job description without anybody ever agreeing to it. We pulled up SOPs we already had and asked a new question about each one, which was which parts of this need one of us. Then we started automating the pieces that could move forward without a person pushing them every single time.
Over months, that simplified the business and gave me back a real amount of time. But the part I care about is that it got us out of more of the work we disliked, which left room for the creative, hands-on work we all want to be doing. That’s my version of this, and it isn’t doing 900% more of everything, it’s doing less of what never needed me in the first place.
I built this for myself first. My week used to be spread across my inbox, my calendar, and wherever my projects were living that month. Now it’s one page. Work, home, at a glance. Ten minutes to build and my gift to you when you register for the Bootcamp through my link.
Answering the objections before you ask them
These are the things I hear every time this comes up, and I’ve had most of them myself.
“I’m not technical enough for this.”
You don’t need to be an AI engineer, and I’m certainly not one. I have used these extraordinarily advanced tools to ask whether chickens can eat corn cobs, so please calibrate your expectations about my sophistication accordingly.
For a long stretch, AI felt to me like transferring into a new school where everybody else had been handed a map. People would say “oh, I built an agent for that,” everyone would nod, and meanwhile I’d be working out whether an agent was different from an assistant, a GPT, a project, an automation, or a man named Steve who works remotely out of Ohio. (If the vocabulary alone makes your eyes glaze, this roundup is a gentler place to start.)
What finally let me off the hook was realizing I didn’t need to learn AI, which would be a bit like spending a weekend learning the internet. I needed somewhere useful to begin, and starting from the job rather than the tool is what made the vocabulary land, because once you know what you’re hiring for, the words stop being trivia and turn into job descriptions.
“Isn’t this exactly how people get replaced?”
I understand the fear and I don’t think it’s silly. Here’s where I’ve landed after a year of this: the work most at risk is the work that was never really anybody’s job in the first place, like finding the document or reformatting the same information for the fourteenth time. No one ever hired a person to do that, and nobody built a career on it.
The work that isn’t going anywhere is the work that requires taste, judgment, relationship and a point of view. What I’d say to my fellow creatives and service providers is simple: your job isn’t going anywhere. But your position might, if you’re not the one deciding how this shows up in your work. Callan’s own company is a decent data point here, since she’s running 150+ AI employees and still hiring humans.
“I already use ChatGPT every day. Isn’t this the same thing?”
That was my exact worry going in, and I was wrong about it. Using ChatGPT daily doesn’t mean AI is integrated into your business in any structural way, it usually just means you’ve gotten fast at a manual process.
If you’re rebuilding context constantly, kicking off every task yourself and deciding every next step by hand, there’s still an awful lot of you in the machine. The Bootcamp moved me from thinking in conversations to thinking in roles, and that isn’t something more practice at prompting was ever going to get me to.
If you’re not ready to spend anything yet, go get better at prompting first, because I keep a post with ten prompts I use and it’s free. Come back here when the back-and-forth starts to feel like the bottleneck.
“I don’t have time for three sessions.”
This is the objection I take most seriously, because time is the real constraint for nearly everyone I know, and I’m not going to pretend three 90-minute sessions across two weeks is nothing.
Every tier includes replays, so you can absolutely watch it later. I’ll also tell you that I got most of my value from building alongside Callan in real time rather than watching afterward, so if your calendar cannot hold three afternoons, you’re buying a somewhat different product than the one I bought, and that’s worth knowing going in.
“I’ve only seen the ads. Is The Uncommon Business actually legit?”
Fair question, and it’s the one I’d be asking if all I’d seen were the ads and a handful of scattered Callan Faulkner reviews online.
The Uncommon Business is a real operating company rather than a course business with a landing page. It has a public website at theuncommonbusiness.co, a team of 40+ humans, and $20.9 million in revenue Callan built in under two years running the exact method it teaches. That last part is the piece I’d weigh most heavily. Plenty of people sell AI trainings, but very few of them are running it at this scale and can pull up the org chart to show you. I paid for the Bootcamp as a student before any of this became an affiliate relationship, which is the only reason I feel comfortable saying so.
“Isn’t AI bad for the environment?”
It has a real footprint and real energy use behind it, and I don’t think the honest answer here is a clean yes or no, so I use it the way I use caffeine, strategically rather than constantly. I batch my sessions and get clear on what I need before I open the tab.
There’s also a version of this that runs the other direction, which is that training something well once, so it holds context and does the job right, means far fewer rounds of prompting later, and fewer prompts is less energy rather than more.
Will using AI make my business less human?
My experience has run the other direction entirely. The more I’ve understood what AI handles well, the more protective I’ve gotten of the work and the parts of my life I want to keep. Back in May, I said this to my own audience, in the cleanest way I know how to put it. Use AI for the work that drains you, not the work that defines you.
I don’t want AI doing everything. I planted 325 tubers myself (my back has notes about this), I homeschool my daughters, I want to write certain things by hand, I want the messy first version of an idea before it’s any good, I want certain conversations to stay conversations, and I want to stay all the way inside the creative work where my own thinking is the entire point.
Then there’s the other pile: finding documents, sorting survey responses, pulling numbers, comparing options, repetitive formatting, and digging back through months of work hunting for a pattern. There’s no small piece of my soul hiding in that spreadsheet. I looked.
How much does the AI Employee Bootcamp cost?
For Fall 2026, General Admission starts at $47 during early bird, VIP starts at $197 during its early-bird window, and Platinum is $397, with each tier including a different replay window and extras.
General Admission, $47 through September 13, then $97, which includes 30-day replay access.
VIP, $197 through September 20, then $297, which adds transcripts, the Quantum Leap Prompt Pack, a bonus 90-minute coaching session with Callan and The Uncommon Business leaders, and three-month replay access.
Platinum, $397 flat, which adds six-month replay access and Callan’s CEO Productivity Playbook.
Pricing and inclusions can change in future rounds, so check the registration page before you buy anything.
I’d think less about which column has the most bullet points and more about how you personally learn. If you’re going to show up live and build during the sessions, General Admission may be everything you need. If you want transcripts, the extra coaching session, and you know you’ll be circling back for months, VIP buys you that room. Platinum stretches replays to six months and adds the Playbook.
Make the call on how much depth you really expect to want after the sessions end, rather than on which tier looks most serious. I say that as somebody who has bought the top tier of things out of pure aspiration and then never opened them. Register through my link and my Mental Load Dashboard comes with it. Your whole week on one page in ten minutes. You can’t buy it anywhere.
Who I think this is actually for
This is not a beginner’s first AI purchase, and I’d rather say that plainly than take your $97. It’s for the person who already has some systems in place, already uses AI most days, and is tired of being the bottleneck in her own business.
If that’s you, you’ll recognize yourself in at least one of these. Everything still starts with you, meaning you use AI constantly and not one thing you’ve built runs without you standing next to it.
- You’ve thought about cloning yourself, because there are too many small jobs hiding inside your one job and every one of them defaults to you.
- You’ve consumed a mountain of AI information and implemented almost none of it, so what you need isn’t another folder of saved prompts but one afternoon where a thing actually gets built.
- You want the time back without turning into a content machine, meaning more room for creativity and relationships and a life, rather than more output with your face on it.
Who I would not recommend it to
If you have zero interest in AI, I’m not going to talk you into it, and that’s a real position I respect. Never opened a tool and don’t want to start? Parts of this will move faster than you’d like. And if you want a magic button that automates your company after three 90-minute sessions, this isn’t that, and neither is anything else. Hoping somebody else does the implementing for you? That’s not how I experienced it either.
Remember my glamorous passenger-seat setup, laptop open and husband driving? The implementation was the value.
What I’d tell you honestly about the limits
This is the part of a review where I’m supposed to hand you a complaint. I want to be straight with you: I don’t have one. I’ve been sitting with that, because I know exactly how it reads coming from somebody with an affiliate link.
So instead of manufacturing a gripe, here’s what I can tell you about the edges of it. Three sessions is three sessions, and it’s a starting line. You leave having built two AI employees, which is more than most trainings hand you, but you do not leave with a company that runs itself. There’s a real gap between I built two of these, I understand the model, and this runs throughout my business. I’d rather you walk in knowing that gap exists than feel misled on October 7th.
The live commitment is real, as I said above, and if what you want is the whole system installed with somebody walking you through it, that’s a different program at a different price.
What’s the difference between the AI Employee Bootcamp and Automate to Accelerate?
The AI Employee Bootcamp is a short live experience that introduces the AI employee approach and gets you building, while Automate to Accelerate, or A2A, is a separate eight-week live implementation program designed to install AI systems more deeply throughout a business. The Fall 2026 A2A program is $8,997.
They’re not the same offer, and the simplest way I’d put it is that the Bootcamp is how you find out whether this way of thinking fits your business, for roughly the price of dinner out, and A2A is what you do once you already know that it does.
My honest verdict on Callan Faulkner’s AI Employee Bootcamp
Would I take it again? I am, and that’s probably the cleanest review anybody can give you.
I went through Callan’s Bootcamp as a student, and I’m going through it again this fall with Marisa. It isn’t because I need three more sessions describing what AI could theoretically do, since the internet has that thoroughly covered. I’m going back because The Uncommon Business changed the question I was asking, from what can you help me with to why is this still my job. And that second question has been worth more to me than any single thing I built with it.
So if you want a magic button that runs your business after three afternoons, keep looking. But if you’re standing in the middle of your own business wondering why all these little jobs still come back to you, this is a useful place to start. You don’t need to catch up on everything happening in AI. You need somewhere to begin.
Frequently asked questions about Callan Faulkner and The Uncommon Business
Is Callan Faulkner’s AI Employee Bootcamp worth it?
Yes, for the right person. Callan Faulkner’s AI Employee Bootcamp is worth it if you already use AI most days and you’re tired of being the one who has to initiate, prompt and correct every single task. I took it as a student before becoming an affiliate partner, and I’m taking it again this fall. If all you want is a folder of clever prompts, skip it.
Is The Uncommon Business legit?
Yes, in my experience. Callan Faulkner founded The Uncommon Business as a real AI implementation company, with a public website at theuncommonbusiness.co, a team of 40+ human employees, and $20.9 million in revenue she built in under two years. It runs the same AI employee method internally that it teaches. I attended the AI Employee Bootcamp as a student before becoming an affiliate.
What is an AI employee?
An AI employee is an AI system that holds a specific job rather than answering one-off questions. It has a defined role, the context it needs to do that job well, a standard for what good work looks like, and boundaries on what it should never do. The term is central to Callan Faulkner’s method at The Uncommon Business.
What is the difference between an AI employee and ChatGPT?
Using ChatGPT means asking a question and steering the answer, and the work stops the moment you close the tab. An AI employee holds its own role, context and standards, and produces the same quality of work without you rebuilding the setup every time. Callan Faulkner’s AI Employee Bootcamp teaches business owners how to make that shift.
How much does the AI Employee Bootcamp cost?
For Fall 2026, Callan Faulkner’s AI Employee Bootcamp costs $47 for General Admission during early bird and $97 after, $197 for VIP during early bird and $297 after, and $397 for Platinum. Every tier includes the kickoff call, the private community and replay access. Check The Uncommon Business registration page for current pricing.
How long is the AI Employee Bootcamp?
The Fall 2026 AI Employee Bootcamp is a kickoff call on September 28 followed by three live 90-minute sessions on September 29, October 1 and October 6. That’s roughly four and a half hours of live training plus the kickoff. Replays are included with every tier.
What do you build in the AI Employee Bootcamp?
On Day 3 of Callan Faulkner’s AI Employee Bootcamp, attendees build two AI employees: an SEO and Site Audit employee that reviews your website pages and flags what’s broken or underperforming, and an ICP Research employee that finds how your ideal customers describe their problems in their own words.
Do you have to attend the AI Employee Bootcamp live?
No. Every tier of The Uncommon Business AI Employee Bootcamp includes replay access: 30 days with General Admission, three months with VIP and six months with Platinum. I attended every session live, and I got more out of building alongside Callan in real time than I would have from watching later.
Is the AI Employee Bootcamp good for beginners?
It’s a good fit if you’ve experimented with ChatGPT or Claude but feel behind or lost in the terminology. It’s not the right first purchase if you’ve never opened an AI tool and don’t want to. Callan Faulkner starts from the job rather than from the technology, which is what finally made the vocabulary land for me.
Is the AI Employee Bootcamp worth it if you already use ChatGPT every day?
Yes, and that was my exact situation. Using ChatGPT daily usually means you’ve gotten fast at a manual process, not that AI is structurally built into your business. Callan Faulkner’s AI Employee Bootcamp moved me from thinking in conversations to thinking in roles, context and standards, which more prompting practice was never going to do.
What is the difference between the AI Employee Bootcamp and Automate to Accelerate?
Both are programs from The Uncommon Business. The AI Employee Bootcamp is a short live training where you build your first two AI employees. Automate to Accelerate, or A2A, is a separate eight-week live implementation program, priced at $8,997 for Fall 2026, built to install AI systems more deeply throughout a business.
Where can I sign up for the AI Employee Bootcamp?
Registration for Callan Faulkner’s AI Employee Bootcamp is on The Uncommon Business website. You can also register through my affiliate link here, which means I earn a commission at no additional cost to you. And when you do, I’ll also send you my Mental Load Dashboard for free.
What could be true a year from now
Here’s the picture I keep circling back to. It’s an ordinary Tuesday, nothing special on the calendar, and instead of opening seventeen tabs and re-explaining yourself to a chat window for the fourth time that week, you open your inbox and the site audit is already sitting there, done. The research on what your actual customers want, in their own words, is already sitting there too. Nobody asked you for any of it that morning. Somebody already knew the job.
That’s not a fantasy. That’s just a Tuesday, for the businesses actually doing this.
I’m not going to tell you AI fixes everything, because it doesn’t, and anyone selling you that isn’t telling you the truth. What I will tell you is that the distance between the version of your business where you’re still the bottleneck and the version where you’ve finally handed off the work that never needed you in the first place is a lot shorter than it feels from where you’re sitting right now. Callan showed me exactly how. Three afternoons, one org chart, two AI employees, a dashboard that finally put my whole week on one page, and I stopped asking myself a question I’d been carrying around for a year.
You don’t have to understand AI to start. You just have to be done being the only person who can do the thing.
